But growing up can help these famed Chesapeake crustaceans. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Cannibalism is the number one killer of the crustaceans that congregate in mid-salinity waters like coastal estuaries. As a result, the blue crabs are relying on the safety of some threatened shallow water habitats, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (). The lives of blue crabs are anything but boring.

This section from Archimedes Palimpsest has a mixture of ancient geometry and Byzantine prayers. The missing page still has traces of geometric diagrams based on Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse's work. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a Byzantine prayerbook written in 1229, but the artifact holds more than what immediately meets the eye. The original writing on its pages was erased and replaced--making it a palimpsest--a common practice during the medieval period for expensive writing materials made from animal-skin like parchment.

Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike. The features of doodles such as Peaches (above), a goldendoodle, have become the canine equivalent of Instagram face. Meet the Breeds, the American Kennel Club's annual showcase of purebred dogs, took place over two eye-wateringly cold days in early February at the Javits Center, in Manhattan. About a hundred and fifty of the two hundred and five varieties recognized as official breeds by the A.K.C., the long-standing authority in the U.S. dog world, were in attendance for the public to ogle, fondle, and coo "So cute!" to, including the basset fauve de Bretagne, a hunting hound from France that's one of three newly recognized breeds recently allowed into the purebred pantheon. Some of the dogs had competed in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show earlier in the week, and past champions had their ribbons on display. In spite of the frigid weather, pavilions hosting the more popular breeds--the pug, the Doberman pinscher, the Great Dane, the St. Bernard--were packed. Lesser-known varieties, such as the saluki, the Löwchen, and the Lapponian herder, drew sparser crowds. There were exhibition spaces for each breed, and on the back walls were three adjectives supposedly describing that particular type of dog's temperament. There is, in fact, no evidence that temperament is consistent within a breed, but the idea is deeply rooted in dogdom. I stopped to caress the velvety ear leather of a pharaoh hound ("Friendly, Smart, Noble"), a sprinting breed once used to hunt rabbits in Malta; accept kisses from a Portuguese water dog, bred to assist with retrieving tackle ("Affectionate, Adventurous, Athletic"); and have my photograph taken with a Leonberger, a German breed from the town of Leonberg, in southwest Germany ("Friendly, Gentle, Playful"). No one was supposed to be openly selling dogs, but, if you asked, the breeders would share their information. Excluding what are known as companion dogs, like the Leonberger, most of the animals at the show were designed for a purpose that is no longer required of them. In Great Britain, foxhounds are legally barred from chasing foxes. Consider the fate of the otterhound, an ancient variety with a noble heritage which was once used in the U.K. to hunt river otters, which were prized for their thick fur and disliked by wealthy landowners because they ate fish in their stocked ponds.

The astonishing moment Scott Bessent returns to interview noticeably shaken after'Situation Room' call from Trump Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back'Awakening' of terrorist sleeper cells sparks World Cup PANIC: Undercover officer reveals'once in 25 year' threat... and America's'Achilles heel' Trump's Iran war death toll climbs to 13 after all crew onboard US refueling plane died in crash Mother reveals awful sight that greeted her when she opened Walmart in-store oven to find daughter, 19, baked to death inside... and denies suggestions it was suicide Recall of cream cheeses upgraded to most serious risk over contamination with deadly bacteria... 'reasonable probability of death' San Francisco's most iconic mansion is bought by ALGERIAN government for $10m Iran-linked cyberattack on US is'first drop of blood' as experts reveal alarming new threat to homeland I've spent 25 years treating patients with autism. This is the truth about the condition that many people don't want to hear: DR MAX PEMBERTON Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Airfares have already doubled on key routes and are getting worse - here's when to book to avoid the worst prices I was pregnant when I discovered my husband was cheating with my male doctor. I still let him deliver our baby... our arrangement may shock you Maker of Mounjaro writes scathing letter to warn of dangerous'chemical reactions' in knock-off versions of weight-loss drug Cher's son Chaz Bono weds'love of my life' Shara Blue Mathes in front of famous mom in Hollywood Mysterious'Trump' airships appearing in 100-year-old sketchbooks sparks'time traveler' theories A wild theory claims President Donald Trump may be a time traveler, with clues scattered through art and literature for more than a century. Sketches of futuristic aircraft drawn by artist Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant who came to the US in 1850 and died in 1923, mysteriously contain the word'TRUMP' and even featured the number 47 - the number of presidents the US has had. Before his death, Dellschau created depictions of fantastical flying machines that he called'aeros,' which often resembled a mix of early airships, balloons and primitive airplanes.

A whistleblower complaint alleges John Solly claimed to have stored highly sensitive Social Security data on a thumb drive. Solly and Leidos, his current employer, strongly deny the allegations. John Solly, a software engineer and former member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is the DOGE operative reportedly accused in a whistleblower complaint of telling colleagues that he stored sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data on a thumb drive and wanted to share the information with his new employer, multiple sources tell WIRED. Since October, according to a copy of his résumé, Solly has worked as the chief technology officer for the health IT division of a government contractor called Leidos, which has already received millions in SSA contracts and could receive up to $1.5 billion in contracts with SSA based on a five-year deal it signed in 2023. Solly's personal website and LinkedIn have been taken offline as of this week.

Kentucky mother and daughter turn down $26.5MILLION to sell their farms to secretive tech giant that wants to build data center there Horrifying next twist in the Alexander brothers case: MAUREEN CALLAHAN exposes an unthinkable perversion that's been hiding in plain sight Hollywood icon who starred in Psycho after Hitchcock dubbed her'my new Grace Kelly' looks incredible at 95 Kylie Jenner's total humiliation in Hollywood: Derogatory rumor leaves her boyfriend's peers'laughing at her' behind her back Tucker Carlson erupts at Trump adviser as she hurls'SLANDER' claim linking him to synagogue shooting Ben Affleck'scores $600m deal' with Netflix to sell his AI film start-up Long hair over 45 is ageing and try-hard. I've finally cut mine off. Alexander brothers' alleged HIGH SCHOOL rape video: Classmates speak out on sickening footage... as creepy unseen photos are exposed Heartbreaking video shows very elderly DoorDash driver shuffle down customer's driveway with coffee order because he is too poor to retire Amber Valletta, 52, was a '90s Vogue model who made movies with Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, see her now Model Cindy Crawford, 60, mocked for her'out of touch' morning routine: 'Nothing about this is normal' Trump's'Doomsday' nuclear command planes spotted circling the US as WW3 fears surge The US military's terrifying'Doomsday planes' have taken to the skies as fears of a nuclear war inch closer to reality. Flight-tracking data has captured multiple launches of the Navy's E-6B Mercury strategic airborne command aircraft since the war in Iran began on February 28. These giant planes, constructed using the frames of the Boeing 707, are built to survive a nuclear war and coordinate America's military response from the air .

Environment Conservation Ocean Florida can't decide if its official saltwater mammal is a dolphin or a porpoise They are not the same animal. Dolphins (right) are more common in Florida, while porpoises (left) are spotted much less frequently. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. States have a surprising number of official symbols . While most people would expect them to have an official motto, seal, and flag, there can also be a state beverage, muffin, soil, fossil, and poem, to name a few.

Heavy-tailed distributions are ubiquitous in real-world data, where rare but extreme events dominate risk and variability. However, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) employ simple decoder distributions (e.g., Gaussian) that fail to capture heavy-tailed behavior, while existing heavy-tail-aware extensions remain restricted to predefined parametric families whose tail behavior is fixed a priori. We propose the Phase-Type Variational Autoencoder (PH-VAE), whose decoder distribution is a latent-conditioned Phase-Type (PH) distribution defined as the absorption time of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). This formulation composes multiple exponential time scales, yielding a flexible and analytically tractable decoder that adapts its tail behavior directly from the observed data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PH-VAE accurately recovers diverse heavy-tailed distributions, significantly outperforming Gaussian, Student-t, and extreme-value-based VAE decoders in modeling tail behavior and extreme quantiles. In multivariate settings, PH-VAE captures realistic cross-dimensional tail dependence through its shared latent representation. To our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate Phase-Type distributions into deep generative modeling, bridging applied probability and representation learning.

Bayesian inference for inverse problems involves computing expectations under posterior distributions -- e.g., posterior means, variances, or predictive quantities -- typically via Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. When the quantity of interest varies significantly under the posterior, accurate estimates demand many samples -- a cost often prohibitive for partial differential equation-constrained problems. To address this challenge, we introduce conditional neural control variates, a modular method that learns amortized control variates from joint model-data samples to reduce the variance of MC estimators. To scale to high-dimensional problems, we leverage Stein's identity to design an architecture based on an ensemble of hierarchical coupling layers with tractable Jacobian trace computation. Training requires: (i) samples from the joint distribution of unknown parameters and observed data; and (ii) the posterior score function, which can be computed from physics-based likelihood evaluations, neural operator surrogates, or learned generative models such as conditional normalizing flows. Once trained, the control variates generalize across observations without retraining. We validate our approach on stylized and partial differential equation-constrained Darcy flow inverse problems, demonstrating substantial variance reduction, even when the analytical score is replaced by a learned surrogate.

Feedback is feeling bold, so here is a prediction: the research we are about to describe is going to win an Ig Nobel award within the next decade. The entire project feels tailor-made for the Igs. It is an effort to objectively measure human flatulence using biosensors, or "Smart Underwear". We learned of this from a press release from the University of Maryland, flagged to us by physics reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan with the phrase: "Surely, Feedback can do something with this." The essential problem is that we do not know the normal range for flatulence, unlike other key biomarkers like blood glucose.